This is a great step in the right direction. I can't speak directly for MIT, but there are issues with how these programs don't apply to parents with small family businesses. My parents had a small business, with my father taking home a salary of $XX,XXX. Duke University used the business assets to determine the EFC (expected family contribution) of literally 90% of the salary. Essentially saying to sell off the family business for the college fund, which was a non-starter.
Small businesses are allegedly the backbone of America, and I feel these tuition support programs overlook this segment of the middle-class.
This may have unintended consequences on chances of a successful application. Now, as a high school senior, you have to compete against an additional pool of strong students who aren't especially interested in MIT's offerings, but have parents pushing them toward the least expensive of all top universities.
It’s not an unintended consequence. Another way of phrasing your concern is “MIT will have an especially strong applicant pool” which is a desirable outcome.
When I was touring colleges as a high school senior I met someone who had gotten into MIT but whose family could only afford to send one kid to an elite college, him or his sister. He decided to go to a state school which was a lot less expensive but whose academics weren't close to the same level. This stuff matters to people.
Started looking and found out there's some much worse, and far more obvious cases that need to implement these reforms. [1]
UPenn is THE most obvious. Sitting on a $20,000,000,000 endowment fund that went up +170% over 10 years while Philadelphia rots with drug use, poverty, and gun violence.
BTW, amazing site to be horrified by gun violence (and vaguely fascinated). Look upon the awfulness of Philadelphia. [2] Sitting in their safe little haven while East and South is wounding murder land with overlapping murder / wounding statistics. (12k from 2014-2023, 190/100000 urban) [3] Northwestern and the violence everywhere South in Chi-town is maybe a personal second choice. ($13,700,000,000, +74%, 26.9k, 280/100000 urban) [4][5]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...
[2] (Guns, Philadelphia) https://www.thetrace.org/2023/02/gun-violence-map-america-sh...
[3] (Location, UPenn) https://www.google.com/maps/place/University+of+Pennsylvania...
[4] (Guns, Chicago) https://www.thetrace.org/2023/02/gun-violence-map-america-sh...
[5] (Location, Northwestern) https://www.google.com/maps/place/Northwestern+University/@4...
Is there a coherent argument tying A to B here? Schools have large endowments and are also sometimes located in violent cities. Is it your contention that one causes the other, or even could in theory affect the other? Otherwise I don’t see the point, you might as well bring up the number of potholes in Philadelphia too.
Also Northwestern is in Evanston, not Chicago. Two different cities.
> UPenn is THE most obvious. Sitting on a $20,000,000,000 endowment fund that went up +170% over 10 years while Philadelphia rots with drug use, poverty, and gun violence.
Why is it UPENN's responsibility to solve these issues? This is Philadelphia's problem, the university is just a business operating in the city.
>Why is it UPENN's responsibility to solve these issues?
Who's responsibility is it? Have you seen how the government operates? Why wouldn't UPENN want to help solve it?
You're asking the wrong question: why would they?
How much have you contributed to Philly's woes?
Probably nothing, because it doesn't benefit you.
> How much have you contributed to Philly's woes?
To resolve Philly's woes?
> Probably nothing, because it doesn't benefit you.
If they pay taxes...
It is the government's responsibility. Change your government with votes.
OK, but they do exist to educate people, and have a comically large endowment to do it with that only keeps growing. I guess their plan is to grow the endowment until all human beings everywhere can get full ride UPenn scholarships?
Going up is what an endowment is supposed to do; you spend some part of the return on operational needs, while also growing the base so you have greater (nominal, and hopefully also real) capacity for that downstream.
If, over the long term, an endowment isn’t growing, it’s being mismanaged.
Governments are just businesses that got too large to call a business too. Why should it be their responsibility?
Hint: because caring about your fellow humans is a good thing
I think that speaks to the low bar we have come to expect from our endowed institutions today more than anything else.
American Universities, historically, are supposed to improve not just their students’ lives but also society as a whole, especially as serving as boosters for the city they’re in and their immediate neighbors. That’s why they’re nonprofits. That’s also likely their strongest lifeline to remain relevant in the future rather than as the hollow alumni clubs and gatekeepers their critics say they are, with AI/the internet/online schooling/topic of the day breaking down socioeconomic barriers to knowledge access
That’s why the Carnegies and Mellons built libraries, museums, and the very literally named Carnegie-Mellon university, back then. Now it seems like the first thing billionaires today do is isolate themselves and their wealth from the masses as much as possible.
UPenn is a land-grant institution, they are not "just a business" they were given land and money specifically to serve the public good. They're why we have engineering degrees, the government specifically wanted institutions that taught practical marketable skills and to do research in those fields.
> UPenn is a land-grant institution
The University of Pennsylvania is one of the nine colonial colleges founded before the United States existed. It predates land grant institutions by over a century. I think you are confusing it with Pennsylvania State University, which is a land grant institution.
> UPenn is a land-grant institution
It isn't.
Despite the name, it's actually a private university.
Penn State is Pennsylvania's land grant university.
> They were given land and money specifically to serve the public good.
Their duty is to deliver education. It's not solving political problems meant for elected officials (and the population at large).
In the short term, yes. Just like an orchard owner can chop down his trees and sell firewood to make a little more money this year.
They spend $9 billion annually on exactly that. This "hoard" can, checks notes, fund barely two years of operations.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/231...
there are many, many people who are paid a lot of money to pretend to believe that the universities should actually be spending less and keeping more for their endowments because that strategy would enable the biggest impact at some indeterminate point in the future
Thetrace.org is in fact pretty sweet looking. Interesting that philly seems to be shot to injur and next door camden seems to be shoot to kill.
What is the argument here, exactly?
You left off
(Drugs) https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/mexico-depicts-phi...
So if a university has money, learning there should be free?
If you don't have guns, you won't have gun violence, but I guess the second amendment won't be changed any time soon.
For a private school, they can choose how to spend their money. Hoarding it is one option.
For the federal government, they can choose how they allocate grants. Withholding grants from greedy schools is one option.
> So if a university has money, learning there should be free?
Not an unreasonable proposition. The purpose of the university is ostensibly to provide an education, not to continue hoarding more and more money.
> purpose of the university is ostensibly to provide an education
One of the purposes. They’re also centres for learning and research and repositories of knowledge.
> Also known as education
No. There are non-teaching research universities. Many universities have non-teaching faculty. Learning != teaching != education.
$9 billion annually [1] qualifies as not spending it, I guess. I wish people actually checked figures before ranting online.
1- https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/231...
The article claims 80% of American households meet this threshold. I wonder what % of their incoming class (say restricted to Americans) meets this threshold.
Use College Navigator for these types of questions:
https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=MIT&s=all&id=166683#...
That link says 72% of incoming freshman in 2022-2023 received financial aid. Also has a full-time beginning net cost average of just under $22,000 in 2022-2023.
It's not a perfect source of data, but there is enough on College Navigator to let you dig into it a bit and compare to other schools.
Princeton has had a similar rule since 2001. Their current number is $100k. 25% of students pay nothing to attend. [0]
[0] https://www.princeton.edu/news/2024/03/29/princeton-trustees... (go tigers)
Approximately 60% of American households earn less than $100K. That's quite a difference in relative size.
Households with earners in their 20's and early 30's don't tend to have a lot of children of university age. One would want to use the median income of households with university-aged children.
(Median income by age rises sharply from 20->40, then flatlines... the median age of a mother is around 27?)
That's a great question, I'd bet it's fair to say that 80% of their applicants would not qualify, and yet it opens the door for some really deserving humans. (Not being able to afford it is why I didn't go to MIT, I also wasn't accepted at Cal, yet UCLA (and all of the UC system for that matter) was under 4,000 a year and that's what my folks and I could afford so that's where I studied.)
MIT is a great financial investment. There is financing already available (federal and private) so presumably if someone wanted to go they likely could. They may leave with debt however.
The median salary of an MIT graduate is 120k and the median debt is 12k, and less for lower income families (2023-2024):
$0 - $30,000 family income: $6,866
$30,001 - $75,000 family income: $9,132
$75,000+ family income: $12,500
Bumping this up to families making $200k seems really unnecessary and helps people that don't really need to help.
https://sfs.mit.edu/undergraduate-students/the-cost-of-atten...
> Bumping this up to families making $200k seems really unnecessary and helps people that don't really need to help.
My household income is right around $200k, and my daughter (still a few years from college) would definitely consider e.g. UC Berkeley, which (including housing) is half the cost of MIT for an in-state student. Free tuition would certainly make her look at MIT more closely, so if the goal is to draw the best students (and helping poor students is a side-effect), then it's a good idea.
Also, it's headline-grabbing. There's at least one poor kid somewhere in the US who will read this headline and consider MIT, when they previously didn't (even though they probably already would have qualified for free, or nearly-free tuition).
I feel like the number of children you have makes a big difference. 1 child vs 5 kids potentially with 2 in college / 3 in private school would be vastly different financial situations.
When I looked at MIT in 1990, tuition was fully covered but housing was BRUTAL.
More than twice my parents mortgage. I'm sure it's worse, now.
It definitely is and is made worse by institutions like MIT and Harvard that don't pay their full tax burden to the city due to the PILOT program. They're allowed to accrue more and more real estate while paying a fraction of the taxes that other property holders would and drive prices up dramatically.
MIT is a great financial investment.
families making $200k seems really unnecessary and helps people that don't really need to help
> They may leave with debt however.
The linked article says not.
Loans are not included in our financial aid offers because we believe your financial aid will cover your expenses. We do not expect any undergraduate to take out a loan. Rather than borrow, most students opt to work during the academic year. At MIT, this work often provides students not only a way to help pay for college but also with world-class research experience.
Yes but the algorithm also is that they take 5% of your assets each year. So if you've saved $1M (not much for a $200K a year couple in their 50s), that's $50K a year out the door.
Honestly, that wouldn’t be a bad way to fund education: education is free, but the university gets taxation power over you so they can tax you at x% of your income. It aligns incentives better than the current system.
In which case you may like how it’s done in the UK. it’s technically debt but in essence works as a graduate tax. The government pays for your education with a loan. You then only pay back 9% of your income over a certain income threshold. You do this until you pay back the loan or 30-40 years have passed. So in practice this is a graduate tax.
Where are you seeing this?
FAFSA. That's one of the calculations that goes into Expected Family Contribution. There is an expectation that parent's contribute some % of income (20%?), 5% of assets, and that the student basically contributes 90% of any income or assets to their name before a single dollar of aid, usually federal loans, will be offered.
For all of you younger folks just starting your families, expect to pay full price for college if you are anywhere near the top 25% of earners (most of this site presumably). Any scholarship money is a bonus but aid probably isn't going to be forthcoming.
The subtext of this MIT announcement is that any family making more than $200,000 will be paying full price to subsidize the poorer students.
This part seems to be getting overlooked -
> And for the 50 percent of American families with income below $100,000, parents can expect to pay nothing at all toward the full cost of their students’ MIT education, which includes tuition as well as housing, dining, fees, and an allowance for books and personal expenses.
> This $100,000 threshold is up from $75,000 this year, while next year’s $200,000 threshold for tuition-free attendance will increase from its current level of $140,000.
- even though that's the article's 2nd and 3rd paragraph.
Awesome. Now let’s lower the bar further and do it everywhere. And then let’s keep doing more until students can pay their tuition with a summer job, like they could when our elders went to school.
I’ll hold off on asking for higher education to be free, as the culture still pushes back on that. But a return to the former model would be most welcome.
I'd like to see a future where a student can have free tuition but (with exception) is required do meaningful civic service work that benefits the community and country that is paying for tuition, ultimately graduating with zero debt if requirements are met.
Maintaining national parks? Helping support inner city? Tutoring and improving public education? Imagine having the majority of American college students contributing to these worthy causes AND getting a strong education.
This is basically the point of PSLF[0]. The cost to participants is not $0, but it can ultimately be very low if they only make income adjusted payments during their 10 years of service.
https://studentaid.gov/manage-loans/forgiveness-cancellation...
Doesn't the federal government already do this? Work for them 10 years and student debt is cancelled?
I think they are suggesting that you would graduate debt free for having done service while getting your education
Do we also return the facilities to the state they were in before, particularly the residential programs? College enrollment percentage? What about a near universal military draft for men?
Not that I think lowering the cost of education is a bad effort but appeals to some prior culture like they are apples to apples comparison is dishonest.
As far as I know, and countries where tuition is free entrance is restricted and the students do not expect to live the United States university lifestyle.
Free would be fine if we could expect actual return on the investment instead of extended high school, delaying adulthood, and channeling people from useful vocations within their grasp.
Why not be more ambitious and aim for free?
It's never going to happen in a country where politicians try to convince people that college education == elitism, and a significant part of the population actually believes that
It is difficult to enact meaningful change in a country that doesn't see supporting its people as an investment in itself. Discussing the price when it should be free is a distraction.
Won’t happen as long as the govt is giving out free loans, which is the driver of increasing tuition prices.
I tried to check if that was true, but couldn't find much historical tuition data online. What little I did find showed that tuition adjusted for inflation has been increasing fairly steadily for over 100 years, and I didn't really see any change in the rates between before government loans and after.
Maybe if I had found data for a wide range of schools instead of just a couple of hard to get into schools there would have been a more noticeable effect.
Clearly nothing to do with inefficient administration, then. Here in Australia, where a friend's wife works as the PA for the Dean in one of our foremost universities, and I know numerous lecturers, some of whom are moving overseas for better opportunities (in Southeast Asia of all places!), the faculty-members-over-beer perspective is largely that the universities are head-in-sand about AI and about to become far less relevant. IMHO MIT OCW is great, we need more of that, and more mini-courses.
I was going to comment that free loans and inefficient/outsized admin go hand-in-hand. On further thinking if you take away the loans, the admin has no choice but to shrink and achieve higher efficiencies.
Yeah, education should be free. Record all lectures and put them out there. Charge a small fee to view them if you must but lecturers repeating themselves is not my idea of a great use of their time. Yes, I know lots of lectures are already published.
It really depends on the subject matter and the institution's focus (and tier). For disciplines where foundational knowledge remains relatively unchanged (say, Latin) recorded lectures could be an efficient way to disseminate information without requiring professors to repeat the same material. A "flipped classroom" would offer opportunities for more dynamic interaction and deeper understanding, and of course this would cost money.
However, as a professor myself in a rapidly evolving STEM field adjacent to AI, I update at least 20% of my course materials each year to keep pace with new developments. As it happens, about a third of the new content is derived from my research group's latest work. Recording lectures isn't a one-time effort; it would require constant updates to remain relevant (and let me tell you, if you want to get the voice-over right, it is a lot more time-consuming and soul-crushing than simply turning up in class and giving a live lecture).
The value of live lectures goes beyond just "transmitting" content. They offer real-time interaction, immediate feedback, and dynamic discussions that adapt to the students' understanding. This level of interaction devilishly difficult to replicate in recorded formats.
I would ramble on more, but I need to return to the lecture materials I am developing for this Friday on Vision-Language Models :P
Watching non-interactive lectures is a small part of the overall experience. I'm not commenting on whether the experience is 'worth it', but assuming the only thing people get is the ability to watch lectures doesn't make the point.
A big part of it is having a long-term peer group of people who were disciplined and motivated enough to get into MIT and succeed there. Arguably true for any university. We're products of our environments, and if you surround yourselves with hardworking people it rubs off on you.
On the other hand, many people act like "talking to professors over beer" (or to your classmates, for that matter) is supposed to add "value" to the college experience, when it's perfectly possible to get at least a bachelor's and a master's without ever doing that (source: I did).
Two people with the same GPA and same piece of paper from the same college, may have gotten different amounts of lasting value from their college experience.
I can understand why they might do this. Many people who own a small business underpay themselves significantly and use the extra funds on the business to build up assets. This defers taxes and allows the funds to be reinvested without tax. They might even take out loans on those business assets. The same way the wealthy will pay themselves a tiny salary and just live off the asset value of their stock. Someone who owns their own business could also easily drop their salary significantly for the year prior to applying to college.
Isn't the entire point of these assessments to look at total assets, and not just annual income?
I dont think this was an oversight or mistake. I think the expectation was that yes, people should sell assets if they have them .
Why are such things in the US so complicated? Where I live, studying is much much cheaper for most professions,for everyone!
That's the only fair way. Also, a set of well educated people pays itself back later in the form of mostly income and added value taxes, which provides money to keep studying for cheap for the next generation.
Because education is largely an afterthought, and universities primarily compete on entertainment and prestige.
High cost and exclusivity is the entire point.
A university open to all with a fraction of the price would be a poorly ranked one in every competitive measure.
Still, I do not get it. Why would this competition / exclusivity rule be so much less prevalent in large parts of Europe?
I don't want to say Europe is without problems, but I think this kind of legislation, together with social security in general, is a clear example of how it can be handled more efficient and fair for most people.
> universities primarily compete on entertainment and prestige.
I like to call this "resort-style education".
>Where I live, studying is much much cheaper for most professions,for everyone!
I'll go out on a limb and bet people in your country earn much less than the average American, too. Why? Why don't companies just pay these people more? IT all comes back in income and value added taxes.
I don't know where the OP lives. But in Switzerland, where world-class univeristies like the ETH cost something like $ 1.5k a year in tuition, I'm pretty certain that people earn more on average than in the USA.
Roger Freeman, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan's education advisor, was afraid that educated voters would turn the United States towards communism.
One of Ronald Reagan's campaign promises was dismantling or breaking the department of education, similar to what he had done to California's state universities by limiting their budgets and moving the burden of tuition to students.
At the time this was quite popular as it lowered taxes.
Because America is a place where people have been indoctrinated to believe that misery is the cost of freedom. It's a place where half the population would rather read your obituary or donate to your fundraiser than simply have a healthcare system that people can use in a timely manner without worrying about cost.
American universities sell their students a lot of amenities that aren't really necessary for study. Not to mention the bloated admin class. You want to feel "in" when it comes to social justice? Here are your administrators that do the rituals of social justice as a full-time job, but they demand salaries.
As for amenities, back in Europe, many universities don't even have a campus, just a scattering of buildings all around the city, acquired randomly as the school grew (that includes dorm buildings, often quite far from one another). You will spend some extra time commuting among them, but the university saves money - and, indirectly, you too.
Getting from dorm to lectures usually took me about 30 minutes each way - on foot, then subway, then on foot again.
Heh, for my jurisdiction, to get gov financial aid for a 2nd degree, they expected me to withdraw from retirement savings to fund it, but no similar expectation if you had a locked-in defined contribution pension plan (lol I wish).
Nor would they expect you to take a line of credit against the equity in property if you owned any, but stocks are always a rich person luxury that you can sell!
Kinda cemented that we’re rewarding a failure to save and rewarding a failure to save in something liquid.
It’s incredibly difficult to structure these rules in a way that doesn’t discriminate against small businesses while not opening a giant loophole for the rich.
The reason is because small business owners are often, by any measure that doesn’t explicitly discount ownership of the business, actually rich.
Why is the price you have to pay for something dependent on how much money your parents make? Feels so unfair
Because it is really a discount to the parents, not the student. It is understood that few 17 year olds have saved enough money to pay MIT's tuition of $85k/year for 4 years and parents are usually footing the bill.
Yes, students who's parents have money but choose not to spend it get a rough deal. You can make a pretty strong case that it is their parents screwing them over, not the school. The school doesn't owe a discount to prospective students.
In my opinion, you're reasoning about it incorrectly.
What if I said: the price is the same for everyone, but people with less access to money get proportionally more assistance paying that price?